by the Rev Kat Campion-Spall, Associate Vicar at St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol and Dean of Women’s Ministry
How long is a week? We all know that sometimes time seems to rush past and it is Saturday evening again with most of the jobs we had hoped to do still on a “to be done” list. Weeks during lockdown sometimes seemed to be endless, especially with active children desperate to get out and meet friends. But how many days are there in a week? The Church of England doesn’t seem to be able to come up with a consistent answer to that basic question.
Seven? Apparently not. Try scanning the end pages of the Church Times, and looking at the part-time incumbencies advertised there. A post described as ‘two-thirds’ which turns out to mean Sunday + 3.5 days, with no mention of remuneration. Another advertised for 4 days including Sunday, for half a stipend plus a house. A ‘half-time’ post: Sunday + 3 other days. Other advertisements offering a 0.5 stipend don’t commit to a number of days, but the job description would be almost impossible even for a full-time incumbent. It’s not transparent, it’s not consistent, it’s often mathematically impossible, and it doesn’t seem to allow for any days off! The Church of England announces that more women than men are being selected for ordination training, but that is not the whole story: these “part-time” roles impact on women much more than on men.
A House for Duty post which comes with nothing but that house, and which expects working on Sundays and two or three other days, may be useful for a priest entering retirement with a pension, but anyone under pensionable age will lose pension contributions in such a role. Women clergy are nearly twice as likely as men to be ordained as an SSM (Self Supporting Minister), roles which usually have no kind of remuneration. Two-thirds of women are over 40 when they begin training; nearly 40% who started last September were over 50. Whatever their experience, and whatever the reason for not offering, or being selected, for ordination when younger, this group will usually only be considered for SSM posts. Dioceses differ in the proportion of women who are in such posts; could this be to do with differing attitudes among senior staff towards enabling women to balance ministry with family commitments?
But there is a growing need for properly paid part-time posts, particularly for the younger women who the Church of England says it wants to attract. Nationally, in the general workforce, in 2020 38% of women in employment were working part-time, many as a considered choice, compared with 13% of men. Yet in the Church of England, only around 15% of women and 6% of men are in part-time stipendiary roles. While examples of flexibility and good practice exist, it seems that the challenges of planning a fair and workable package, usually including housing, often mean that part-time is put in the “too complicated” box, so part-time roles are rare and, where they are offered, can lead to bad practice.
In my role as Dean of Women’s Ministry, I have heard too many stories from my own diocese and further afield of women who went through discernment for ordination at a time in their lives when they didn’t want or couldn’t manage a full-time post, and so to enable them to have the part-time roles they need, have been pushed into self-supporting ministry which isn’t really what they want, and which does not always allow them to develop the ministry they have the potential to offer.
There’s the half-time vicar who wasn’t told until she’d started that she had to pay the rent on half the vicarage. There’s the priest who took a half-time chaplaincy post and then looked into an additional half-time parish post to discover there literally were not enough days in the week for her to do both. There’s the vicar with a young family who moved from a full-time stipendiary role to a house for duty post as a way of working part-time, which means she misses out on potentially a decade’s worth of pension contributions despite being in work. And the vicar in her fifties whose peers in other professions were dropping down to 4-day weeks to enjoy a more balanced life, who simply didn’t see that option in the church and so left ministry.
We know that there are going to be changes in how ministry, both stipendiary and SSM, will have to be organised in the coming years. We also know that a healthy church will need to attract and retain a diverse range of clergy. Until we have cracked a transparent, consistent and fair way of remunerating part-time roles, we won’t be attracting and retaining those clergy for whom full-time doesn’t work: many of them, women.
Any thoughts?